March 13 (Bloomberg) -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel may
be preparing to ditch her current coalition partner in favor of
a rerun of her alliance with the Social Democrats after this
year’s election, said Reiner Haseloff, the prime minister of
Saxony-Anhalt state.

With her Free Democratic coalition partner polling about a
third of the 14.6 percent support it won to enter government in
2009, Merkel will probably be forced to look for an alternative
after the Sept. 22 ballot, said Haseloff, a Merkel confidant and
executive board member of her Christian Democratic Union party.

“Mathematically only coalitions of the CDU bloc with the
Greens or CDU-SPD are conceivable” if current polls are right,
Haseloff, a trained scientist like Merkel, said in an interview
on March 6 in Magdeburg, the state capital. “I regard CDU-SPD
as more realistic because there’s not much in the way of
successful experiments with CDU-Greens.”

Six months out from federal elections that will determine
whether Merkel wins a third term, the chancellor’s handling of
the euro-area crisis has been rewarded with near-record personal
ratings while her Christian Democratic bloc leads the main
opposition Social Democrats by as many as 15 percentage points.
Germany’s electoral system means she’ll still need a coalition
partner to gain the majority needed to govern.

Merkel ruled in a so-called grand coalition with the SPD
during her first term from 2005 to 2009. There has never been a
CDU-Greens federal government and the only such coalition at the
state level, in Hamburg, lasted less than two years before
breaking up due to differences over energy policy and the
environmental impact of deepening the River Elbe for the harbor.

How to Deal

“The chancellor already knows how to deal with the SPD,”
Haseloff said. Given the Social Democrats’ domination of the
upper house in Berlin, the Bundesrat, the Merkel government is
already de facto “operating with a grand coalition,” he said.

Haseloff, 59, who became prime minister in 2011 at the head
of a grand coalition that has ruled in Saxony-Anhalt since 2006,
said that he often sees the chancellor several times a week.
Aside from their shared CDU background, he and Merkel were born
within five months of each other and both grew up in communist
East Germany; both are from religious families that suffered
persecution in the east; both gained doctorates in physics.

“We had the same historical formative things in our
lives,” Haseloff said in his state chancellery, a 19th century
former Prussian army headquarters perched above the Elbe River.
He says he has “a trusting relationship” with Merkel.

Texting Merkel

“If something is acute I can just call her on her mobile
phone,” he said. “Even between Christmas and New Year’s I was
in her election district on vacation and sent her a short text
message. She answered immediately. Within a single day we
exchanged four or five text messages.”

For Haseloff, winning eastern Germany is key to clinching
the election. In 1998 and again in 2002, the CDU was ahead in
the nine states of western Germany yet lost the vote to Social
Democrat Gerhard Schroeder because its support dropped in the
east, according to Haseloff. The CDU is currently in power in
five of the east’s six states, with three CDU premiers and
acting as coalition partner in two other regions.

“If we don’t win in the east, then it’s hard to win the
election,” Haseloff said. “One can’t win a federal election in
the east but one can lose an election in the east.”

Saxony-Anhalt, located in the center of northern Germany
with a population of 2.3 million, is redolent with German
history and culture.

Haseloff’s home town of Wittenberg is where Martin Luther
began the protestant reformation in 1517. Johann Sebastian Bach
composed many of his most famous works while living in the town
of Koethen, including the “Brandenburg Concertos” and the
“Well-Tempered Clavier.”

Bauhaus, Bismark

Dessau is a modern architecture landmark with its Bauhaus
movement under Walter Gropius. The state is the birthplace of
Germany’s 19th century Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, and
its Altmark region is the cradle of Prussia.

Magdeburg was gutted in an allied bombing raid at the end
of World War II, making it the third-most devastated German city
after Dresden and Cologne, according to the city’s website. The
Jan. 16, 1945, raid destroyed 60 percent of buildings and 90
percent of its historic center.

Today, the state’s three biggest employers are Deutsche
Bahn AG, with 8,000 staff; The Dow Chemical Co. with 5,400
workers; and Deutsche Post AG, with 5,100 employees, according
to data from the prime minister’s office.

Energy prices as a result of the transition to renewables
from nuclear power will be a top theme in Merkel’s re-election
campaign, Haseloff said. Germany had the third-most expensive
household electricity in the 27-nation European Union in 2012
after Denmark and Cyprus, according to EU data.

He backed government efforts to legislate cutting household
electricity costs before the election by shifting more of the
burden to industry. Energy policy will be one of the most
important areas of a third Merkel term, when she may create a
dedicated energy ministry, he said.

Energy is “the most strategic task since German
reunification in relation to the economy” he said.